


Dave is Never Roadtripping with John Again. Like, Ever.

by Schmuzz



Category: John Dies at the End - David Wong, Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-03
Updated: 2013-08-18
Packaged: 2017-12-22 08:08:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/910888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schmuzz/pseuds/Schmuzz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John and Dave, on their way to visit Dr. Marconi in Las Vegas, take a detour neither is expecting or very happy about.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. If This Were A Horror Movie John Would Be The Dumb Blonde With The Perky Nipples Who Dies First

**Author's Note:**

> Done for the Welcome to Nightvale Community Kink; takes place after This Book is Full of Spiders Seriously Dude Don't Touch It, but it doesn't contain any detrimental spoilers.

The last time I went to Vegas John and I witnessed an interdimensional tear in reality, and possibly erased one of our friends from existence. No one could blame me for not wanting to go back.

"Don’t be a pussy,” John criticized from behind the wheel of his car. Well, okay, it wasn’t actually his car – that had been mangled, drowned in a lake, and used as a makeshift shield against a personal armada about a year ago; John had taken to bumming rides from Head and the girls he had in a constant banging schedule. “If Marconi wanted us to come down here, it has to be important.”

“So important he couldn’t tell us on the phone?”

“Yes. Exactly. That important.” It was the Fourth of July weekend; if I had to guess John had hung up the phone himself so he’d have an excuse to drag his ass down to Nevada. And my ass, we were kind of a package deal, at this point, at least with the supernatural, unholy, flesh-eating horror that took up roughly one third of our lives. But I did promise Amy that we’d get back by Tuesday – that was the only way I could persuade her not to come. Maybe Marconi just wanted to do an interview with us for some new book, I told her, or something totally innocent and not life risking, but it would be completely boring for her anyway since she wasn’t allowed to mix alcohol with her medication and what was the point of going to Las Vegas if you couldn’t get drunk, really?

She had given me a judging, half lidded stare, but at that point we had both lost our pants and had moved on to much more important things than, you know, my possible future death at the hands of one of John’s plans.

The radio crackled, picking up static and feeble tendrils of music and talk shows. The air conditioner was off since it had been about two hundred miles since the last city, and we had notably less than half a tank left. Maybe we’d just dry out in the south western deserts. John always said that he’d eat me first in that sort of scenario, and it would be a bit slower and less painful than any other way I was going to go. The sun blazed down around us, making my skin stick to the vinyl on the seat coverings, some cramped economy car from Germany or Japan or something John had borrowed from Amber? Ember? Autumn? Well, someone, anyway. The sky was an icy white under the intensity of the sun, and I couldn’t stare at it for more than a few seconds before my eyes throbbed.

“We’re going to need gas soon,” I said, mind drifting off so I wouldn’t have to worry about the heat. I think John said something, reached over to fiddle with the knob of the radio, but by then I was already in a fitful state of warmth-weary sleep.

-

I heard something, woke up. I didn’t open my eyes yet, just tried to piece together what had occurred between falling asleep in the car and now. The vibrations of the road went up through the glass window I was leaning my head against; we were still moving, still in the car. The air was on, frigid and welcoming. But I heard something.

A hum, sort of. Or a type of chittering, like something crawling around in the walls of a gas station bathroom. But even that didn’t make sense. This noise, whatever it was, didn’t have a source. It was in the air, it existed. I guessed that maybe we were in Vegas now, getting closer to Marconi – some sort of weird homing signal. I scrunched my eyes tight. “John?” I said, fighting down a yawn.

“Yeah?”

“Are we there yet?”

“Um,” I heard him shuffle around on his side of the car, and I opened my eyes. The landscape was blank; the afternoon blazed with colors like a campfire out in the distance, behind us. There was a blotch on the horizon; noticeable enough to constitute a town, but this was definitely not Vegas. John, now smoking a cigarette, his window cracked enough to let the hot air inside, looked over and saw me examining my surroundings. He said, “No. No we’re not.”

“How long was I out?” He shrugged. The car had been refueled; probably an hour or more, then, if I was out of it enough to not be wakened by the stop of the car, or the way John liked to peel obnoxiously out of serving stations like he was evading the law. “Where are we?”

“No idea. No signal for GPS,”

“Oh, well that’s ominous.”

“And someone at the gas station told me to follow this route to get into the city.”

“What’d that person look like?” John squinted.

“Well they didn’t exactly look like a person, now that I’m thinking about it.” The radio clicked on, stopping me from listing the collected tally of why this was the worst fucking idea John had since April, when he thought it was time to start his long awaited adult film career in my trailer. The buzzing got louder. John and I glanced at each other, preparing for a top forty song about to be mangled by some evil power in some weird signal meant for us.

“No one is as they seem to be,” a voice said. Total NPR style; soothing and deep. That town had barreled forward in the few minutes since I woke up, and I could see the buildings, blinking restaurant signs, lit windows. “Even you are hiding something deep inside yourself that you cannot place; welcome to Night Vale.”


	2. It's Only Like The Fourth Worst Denny's Dave's Ever Been To While Sober

“Well,” John said, decisively, “Shit.” I mutely seconded that thought. The town we were in – Night Vale, fine, it was a better name for a town than [Undisclosed], anyway – it seemed to be the same size; spread out, mostly suburban, but big. Unnaturally big for an isolated desert community. And it had an Arby’s, and an Applebee’s, and a few brand name car lots. We settled onto one of the main roads of the town, looking partially abandoned because of its supernatural nature or because it was four o’ clock on a Friday, either one.

“We could still go back,” I said. John turned a shoulder. To most people that was a noncommittal motion to mean that he’d think about it, but for John that was more of a ‘You should know better than that by now, dipshit.’ We kept on driving.

The radio was still playing that report. It hadn’t degraded into any perilous messages – by our standards, at least. “The city council would like to take a moment to remind everyone that trees are not your friends. Yes, I understand that what with the Fourth of July weekend coming up, and the various outdoor excursions that may bring to those… ill-advised enough to go out of doors during a widespread holiday,” the voice carried on, grimly, “But it has come to the council’s attention that several trees from the Whispering Forest – you know, that strange manifestation of talking trees that came by a few months ago and dragged an estimated of sixty-three townspeople into its depths, never to be seen again? Yes, that one. Well, it has apparently managed to cross pollinate with the other, less menacing trees in the area, such as the ones in Grove Park; affecting several species such as maple, pine, and invisible. They have been observed communicating with passerby. Town officials recommend that, instead of the usual picnic with your family, we use this year’s supply of ritualized explosives to set fire to these infected trees. So, I hope you all stock up on s’more supplies while you build a cleansing pyre in your yards!” A low, sinister tune on piano began playing in the background, and the announcer continued to speak.

“Weird,” I said. “But not…” Well, it wasn’t [Undisclosed]. Yet. “What now?” John paused at a stop sign; not because of the law, just because he needed to crane his head left, then right down each street.

“I see a Denny’s,” he said conspiringly.

We both knew what that meant. He slammed on the gas, wrenching me back against the damp seating of the car.

“In other news,” the voice continued, “There are two visitors in our little town of Night Vale,” the man ended it on a cordial tone, and it assuaged me a bit, until I realized that they were probably talking about us.

“That’s not –”

“They’re currently driving in a, what is that, a Volkswagen? They appear to be in their late twenties, slightly shaken, and heading towards the Denny’s on Sanders street. Something about them oozes from their being; they don’t want to be here, the panicked, slightly grayish aura around them says – but they’ve seen much more terrifying, nightmarish, traumatic things in their lives, and they are slowly dawning upon the realization that, for whatever reason, they have been called here by forces beyond their control – but, the one in the passenger seat can’t help but think frantically, tugging on his seatbelt with his large, sweaty hands, what in his own life hasn’t been beyond his control? Well, except for that one time in the high school locker room, where he managed to bring a kn–” John had pulled into a small parking space on the side lot and promptly shut the car off. I fumbled with the seatbelt and heard it click and slide away from me in time for John to get out, stomp over to my side, and wrench me out of the car into the blaringly hot sunlight. He pushed me into the Denny’s and I couldn’t bring it in me to resist all that much.

Denny’s was sort of a place of refuge – that or a Waffle House. It had all the appeal of a greasy, home owned diner but with the hazy promise of regular health inspections. It was shit, really, but from one end of the world to the other, it was all the same shit, sort of like a crappy home team advantage. We slid into a booth – there were two cups of coffee there. I don’t know if in my anxiously blind state I missed John ordering them or if this psychic clusterfuck of a town already knew what I wanted.

John grabbed the whitish porcelain and drained half of it. He looked back at it like he really, really wished he was drinking a beer instead. Or a shot of tequila. I drank mine; wondering in the back of my head if it was poisoned before figuring nah, too easy, and I gulped the rest of it down.

John was looking over at me, making sure I didn’t slam the coffee cup down and start taking fistfuls of glass into my eye, or anything. I mean, not that I blamed him. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I looked around at the sticky walls of the restaurant; the gold and orange and red of the décor. There were people inside – normal seeming, bored people who weren’t eyeing the pair of us strangely, but I didn’t look too close.

“So,” John started. He was playing with the sugar packets, stacking them one on top of each other. Except, instead of piling them like pillows, he had someone managed to get one of them to stand straight up, then another on top of that, so he had five packets that reached about half a foot in height off the tacky table. He leaned back in his seat, examining his handiwork for a moment. “Something’s off here.”

I nodded. At least we were both seeing the same thing. “Did you hear – ?”

“Yeah,”

“But it’s not, like –” I glanced around again. The people in the nearby booths – eight of them, I counted: Three teenage boys in baseball uniforms, shoveling into an early dinner after practice had ended; a young couple, talking quietly and smiling a little in a way that made me miss Amy more than I usually do at any given point; an older couple enjoying an early bird special silently, and a lone guy in a smudged lab coat, furiously tapping away at a laptop, two cups of coffee next to him. He had also realized the sugar packet trick, but had only stacked three up in the corner, next to the bottle of ketchup. They still looked normal this time around, but…

“I don’t like this,” I said, because there was a twist in my gut that was warningly punching my kidneys, telling me to get my fat ass up from the booth, take John, and run to the car and drive, just drive away until everything disappeared. It wasn’t just that I tried to avoid situations like this, no matter how futile the not getting involved with the weirdest shit ever tended to be for me, but, well, this wasn’t home.

And I couldn’t tell if that was worse.

Night Vale, from the five minutes I had seen behind the car windshield, had looked nice. Disarmingly nice. A little more well-scrubbed than our town. It still probably had the same homeless people, and the cabs that didn’t look like cabs, and more chain restaurants and gas stations and white trash neighborhoods and rich people all smashed together in one sample size of the American population, but it definitely had that feeling of disarming friendliness to it. Not creepy like a Stepford façade, but still, nicer. Like everyone knew how batshit this place was, but instead of moving or getting therapy they all just decisively… got used to it.

I halfheartedly muttered my thoughts to John, who figured that my ramblings meant that I had recovered from the psychic radio broadcast – I guess I had. You couldn’t afford to hang on to every soul piercingly painful brush with the unnatural; well I mean, I couldn’t. As I was talking I noticed one of the patrons – the one with the lab coat, had turned in his seat and was staring at us, briefly, before going back to his work.

After I finished talking a few minutes later John was busy simultaneously agreeing with everything I said and shoveling some sausage links into his mouth, not three seconds after the waitress had walked away.

“Thank God for Denny’s,” I said, starting on the second cup of coffee she had served. I paused, looked around the restaurant, gripped the handle a little tighter. “John?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t think that waitress had a face.” John seemed to think about it.

“No, actually. I don’t think she did,” He reached for his cup. “But she did call me ‘sugar’ so, I guess she figured out how to work around that sort of thing.”


	3. Don't Forget To Tip Your (Faceless) Waitress

“How can she –” A shadow fell, long and dark across the table. I glanced back at the window on the other wall, then at the overhead lights; neither were angled properly to give off that sort of silhouette, but it didn’t matter since it disappeared once John and I slowly glanced up to the figure standing before us; lab coat guy. The bleached fabric contrasted with his black, rustled hair, his dark trousers, shirt, skin, glasses, eyes. But I had seen things that were black and white – literally. This guy just had something of a dress code. He was probably normal.

  
“Hey,” John said, coolly. “I’m John, this is Dave. And you’re someone who’s staring at us. Kind of freaky. And hella rude.”

  
The man blinked. “I’m… Carlos,” he said, put off by John as an entity. Especially a talking one; most people were. “And you two aren’t from around here, are you?”

  
“What gave it away?” John said, “The conspiracy theories my friend was spouting over here,” He waved a syrup drenched fork in my general direction, “Or that psychic guy on the radio. Or did we imagine that?” He looked at me. “Did you decide if we imagined that?”

  
Carlos looked surprised. “Oh,” he said, “That’s on right now? Usually it’s only just starting whenever I happen to turn the radio on.”

  
“Alright, well, not imagining it,” John supplied, helpfully. He took another sip of coffee and kicked my shin under the table.

  
“So, that radio program,” I said slowly, “That’s a thing? That exists.”

  
“Welcome to Night Vale,” Carlos supplied. It sounded like the sort of line someone would use after something fucked up in the town happened. Someone walks down the street and their toes disintegrate, ‘Welcome to Night Vale’; a person tries to take a shower but instead of water it’s shit mixed with raspberry jelly, ‘Welcome to Night Vale’. “Yeah, it’s – something, isn’t it?”

  
“It really fucking is,” I muttered. I drank some more coffee.

  
“You sound kind of freaked out,” John observed. “Not as much as Dave because he’s been off his meds for the past three days and on top of that is a wuss,” Carlos blinked, glanced down at me. “But everyone else seems fine.”

  
“I’ve only been here a little over a year now.”

  
“You moved here?” I asked.

  
“Didn’t you?”

  
John waved his hand. “Nah, we’re just passing through. Took some shitty directions and stopped here.”

  
Carlos squinted and adjusted his glasses. “You ended up here by mistake,”

  
“Yeah,”

  
“And you stopped here? As in the car didn’t suddenly lose its engine, you didn’t feel compelled to stay? You just, parked the car?”

  
John pointed out the front window. “We stopped here because that fucking creepy phone-sex operator voice guy started talking about us like he was in the backseat. And telekinetic.”

  
“Telepathic,” I corrected.

  
“Also there was a Denny’s. We like Denny’s.”

  
“It’s a love hate relationship,” I offered, reaching for a napkin dispenser. Somehow I got grease on my hands from just drinking out of the coffee cup. Glancing to my left, Carlos seemed to have the sort of mildly disgusted look of someone who was civilized enough to not punch others in the face and storm off without a verbal farwell – the punching thing might have been enough though, I guess not in polite company – but who really, really wanted to break their morals just once. It was not an unexpected reaction. Who knew? Maybe the radio voice was some sort of prophetic god in the town. It would explain the whole ‘all-knowing’ thing or the offended look on his face.

  
“Do you plan on leaving, then?” Carlos asked, taking his hands out of the pockets of his labcoat to wring them together. “Soon?”

  
John leaned back in the booth. “Just a second Bill Nye. You’ve been here a year and you’re staying?” He squinted. “Are you one of those scientists that tries to cure brain cancer but ends up starting the zombie apocalypse? Because we really don’t want to come back here if you fuck everything up.”

  
“No, I’m. I’m a scientist – a sane scien… well it’s a little difficult to be sane in this place, but I do my best. I was thinking that you two seem rather relaxed for getting such a, uh, welcome from the radio while you were driving into town.”

  
“We’re used to it.” John said, shrugging. “And not like the ‘I’ve been to ‘Nam I’ve seen some shit so we’re used to it’ used to it. It’s more like a ‘I’ve seen some guy’s exposed intestines sprout eyes, tie itself together in knots and choke the man to death’ sort of used to it, you know?”

  
Carlos the Scientist stared really hard at John for an uncomfortable amount of time. I glanced over at the sugar packets – still suspended like it was a sculpture – and flicked it over with my finger. Some of the packages landed in John’s mess of syrup, pancake, and ketchup, a few landed on his lap on the other side of the booth.

  
I mentioned where we lived and Carlos was revitalized again. Somewhat. He looked a little pale. I figured if he was studying anything it was how the hell things worked in this town. The short story was that they didn’t. The longer one was that there might be a portal to hell or some other reality or something even weirder manipulating things. Shadow Figures flying around, snatching people up, Soy Sauce dealers, that sort of thing. But I didn’t want to damage his flimsy grasp on real life; not that I’d spent much time focusing in school, but I guessed having two and two add up to four was a big deal with the scientific community.

  
“Anyway,” I said, drumming my hands on the table, “It’s been really nice to meet you Carlos but I think my friend and I are going to keep driving. We have someone to see, someone not here.”

  
Carlos nodded. John was swiveling his head around, looking for our faceless server. Funny, I remembered seeing her after she walked away, and everyone else had their food on the tables, but I never remembered seeing any staff outside the kitchen.

  
Funny. Yeah, that was a good, safe word to use. I’d say civilian if the only thing that separated me from any normal person was an occasional hell-drug habit and a decent credit score.

  
“You have to put your money under the sugar packets,” Carlos added, sounding a bit exhausted at the words. “I mean, whisper ‘check please’ into your cup, then get the check out from the sugar packets and put the right money under it.”

  
“I’m not talking to a cup,” I said.

  
“I know you can hear me,” John had most of his mouth in his coffee mug. I sighed. “Pass up the fucking check and – Dave who’s paying for this?”

  
“Do the sugar packets take credit cards?” I asked.

  
“Yeah. They usually keep them, too. You get someone else’s card instead.”

  
“Well you were saying how your credit’s shit,” John started. I got out a crumpled twenty from my wallet and looked. There was a fucking check under the sugar packets.

  
And the total was twenty-one fifteen without tip. What the fuck.

  
“I hate this place,” I muttered, and took my wallet back out.


End file.
